They built a $1.2 billion healthcare AI company in under three years, but they say the hardest part of healthcare AI isn't the AI.

This week, Halle sits down with Assort Health co-founders and co-CEOs Jeffery Liu and Jon Wang, whose company reached a $1.2 billion valuation in under three years. They discuss why building great healthcare AI takes far more than good models, how they scaled from 15 employees to nearly 250 in a year, and what they've learned from more than 190 million patient interactions. They also share why voice AI is harder than it looks, how they're thinking about building durable moats in the age of foundation models, and why helping patients navigate the healthcare system may be one of AI's biggest opportunities.

Back by popular demand, 3x Heart of Healthcare guest Eric Larsen joins Steve to answer listener questions on healthcare's AI revolution. Drawing on the ideas behind his latest essay, Healthcare's Oppenheimer Moment, Eric argues that healthcare may be approaching a once-in-a-generation inflection point, and discusses what leaders need to understand before it's too late.

Autonomous vehicles may be the closest real-world example of AI operating in life-and-death situations at scale. Justin Norden believes healthcare has a lot to learn from how that industry approached safety, testing, adoption, and trust. 

This week, Michael and Halle sit down with the founder and CEO of Qualified Health, fresh off the company’s $125 million Series B, to discuss why healthcare organizations need to think differently about deploying AI. Justin shares how his experience at Stanford, Apple, Waymo, and in healthcare investing shaped his view that health systems need AI infrastructure, governance, and workforce buy-in, not just another point solution.

AI in healthcare may be entering a new chapter, one where the biggest question is no longer whether the technology works, but who is willing to deploy it, measure it, and take responsibility for the risk.

This week, Steve sits down again with Eric Larsen to revisit his predictions from last year’s Webby-winning episode on generative AI in healthcare. Eric argues that the first wave of AI has been inflationary, reinforcing the old payer-provider payment model, but that the next wave could be deflationary as automation moves into revenue cycle, administrative work, clinical reasoning, and drug development. They discuss why incumbents still have a narrow window to co-develop the future, why clinical AI may move faster outside the US, and why liability may become the deciding factor in who wins.

Medicaid reimbursements are shrinking, providers are pulling back, and vulnerable populations are losing access to care. Akido Labs is betting that AI can expand care capacity fast enough to reverse that trend.

This week, Halle sits down with Prashant Samant, co-founder and CEO of Akido Labs, to discuss what it actually takes to scale care with AI. They explore why Akido built a full-stack healthcare company, how its AI operates inside real clinical workflows, and why the hardest patients are the best place to test whether this model works.

Forty million people use ChatGPT for health-related questions every day, making it one of the most widely used tools for health information in the world. So what is their team doing to maximize impact and minimize harm?

In this full circle episode, Halle Tecco sits down with her Rock Health co-founder Nate Gross, who also co-founded Doximity (DOCS) and is now VP of Health at OpenAI. They discuss the astonishing speed of AI progress, how models are trained for safety and accuracy, and what this technological evolution means for every part of the healthcare system.